Yaara Film review: Vidyut Jammwal in a still image (Courtesy: kennybasumatary)
Discard: Vidyut Jammwal, Amit Sadh, Shruti Haasan, Vijay Varma, Kenny Basumatary, Sanjay Mishra
Director: Tigmanshu Dhulia
Evaluation: 2 stars (out of 5)
A beefy Vidyut Jammwal and brooding Amit Sadh, playing both male lead roles, are set to embark on a movie that never quite takes off. Written and directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, Yaara spans five decades – from the early 1950s to the late 1990s – and yet seems caught in a time warp.
The stained action flick would make us believe this is an epic saga. Despite all its flourishing surface and its many historical allusions, it is trapped in a restricted bandwidth. The core of the film is extremely hollow. In the market, the end result does not correspond to the manifest ambition of the company.
Yaara relies on many cross-references of Hindi cinema and misleading references to socio-political developments to mark out the different eras in the lives of the film’s five main characters – four outlaws who stick together until the law catches up heavily on them) and the girlfriend / wife of one of the guys.
The first quarter of the 130-minute film is blurry, frantic, and completely confusing. This leaves room for a stretch where the plot becomes a bit clearer and smoother, allowing characters to take their places and give the storyline some recognizable outlines. You understand that this is a story of friendship and rebellion, of honor and betrayal, of redemption and retribution involving rebellious misfits who are likely to win against them and who cannot hope to survive. that if they continue to fight.
The main players – Jammwal, Sadh, Shruti Haasan, Vijay Varma and Kenny Basumatary – are waving aimlessly as the irregular scenario leaves no room for maneuver to properly channel their energies. Random editing doesn’t help matters. None of the actors, except Jammwal to some extent, are allowed to settle into a steady pace. There are a few scenes where one could just detect lightning bolts of Sarika in Shruti Haasan. Sadly, his character arc is sadly inconsistent.
Jammwal, portrayed as gang leader Phagun Gadoliya, cuts across most of the big action scenes. As usual, he reveled in it. Amit Sadh plays the Mubarak “Mitwa” Shahariya temperament. The bond between the two boys dates back to a village near Jaisalmer. They are forced to lead a life of crime long before they enter adolescence. A gangster Shaman (Sanjay Mishra in a cameo) sees the potential in boys when he sees them on a bus escaping the police after avenging the murder of a loved one.
The other two major male roles are tried out by Vijay Varma, whose gait is said to be reminiscent of Bachchan’s 1970s swagger (obviously!), And Assamese actor-director Kenny Basumatary, who is said to play a man from Nepal. . The two fell into dead ends despite their best efforts.
Yaara, a remake of the 2011 French drama The Lyonnais (A Gang Story), is a sprawling detective film that takes into account changing times and the impact this has on the comradeship of protagonists who have known each other since they were boys. Somewhere down the line, thanks to the persuasion of a bureaucrat’s daughter, Sukanya (Haasan), for whom Phagun develops a weakness, they get involved in a group of left-wing activists.
The move is costly. The boys fall under the coup of the state. They end up in prison. Prison sentences tear them apart and they lose contact with each other even as Sukanya, who too is in severe pain at the hands of the law and its executors, renews her contact with Phagun.
When they have finished their prison term, three of them – Phagun, Rizwan (Varma) and Bahadur (Basumatary) get together and decide to clean up their act. The fourth friend, Mitwa, disappears into the blue. A decade later, he resurfaced in Delhi, where the others are now comfortably installed.
Mitwa’s return sparks a new crisis for the quartet as a Bucharest-based international criminal and CBI official Jasjeet Singh (Mohammad Ali Shah, who makes a big impression) is determined to catch the prodigal friend and punish him for transgressions that others are not. t aware of. Their bond is strained to the breaking point as tragedies mount and loyalty is questioned.
Occasional signposts of India’s journey from a newly independent nation-state to a post-liberalization economy appear en route as the gang smuggling weapons and illicit alcohol across the country’s border with Nepal grapples with the vagaries of an unstable and risky country. existence.
Portraits of Jayaprakash Narayan on the walls of Patna (where the gang succeeds in a bank robbery and hope to blame the Naxalites for the crime) or a photo of Mao Zedong in a room of the Delhi student union indicate that the action is taking place in the middle -1970. In addition, a massacre by upper caste men in a village in Jehanabad is mentioned as young left activists prepare for action. There is uproar everywhere – growing unemployment, caste tensions, government corruption and police atrocities.
Posters of Sholay and Amar Akbar Anthony can also be seen in scenes strewn throughout the film. Other than that, someone is singing “Bhale Manush Ko Amanush Banake Chhora“(a song by Amanush), a character quotes Amol Palekar and Chit chor, another imitates a line by Amitabh Bachchan from Trishul (“Yeh taala ab teri jeb se chaabi nikaalke hi kholunga“), and a radio news reader announces the death of the reading singer Mukesh.
Much of the story takes place in the 1970s before the film moved to 1997. In fact, Yaara opens in the late 1990s with Mitwa’s return to Delhi, which sets off a chain of events that tests Phagun and Sukanya’s marriage, then back and forth across the decades. The first parts of Yaara reminiscent of 1970s Mumbai kettles, but the look and feel of the rest of the film tends to be jagged.
Yaara has its moments, but they’re just too rare to make an impact and change the course of the film. This release has no chance of being ranked among Dhulia’s best works. It’s far too capricious to maintain the public interest throughout.
Yaara broadcasts on Zee5.
